Explicit Morality Axis

Behaviour gets measured. Actions carry stated or hidden weights, a counter moves toward one pole or another, and thresholds gate abilities, prices, dialogue and endings. Implementations vary enormously in granularity: some track several named virtues independently, others collapse everything onto one good-and-evil slider with two colour-coded buttons per conversation. Nearly all of them expose the score somewhere in the interface, which changes how people play the moment they notice it.

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar shipped in 1985 with an unusual problem to solve. Origin Systems wanted a role-playing game with no villain, in which the goal was to become a moral exemplar, and tracking eight virtues was the only way to make that goal checkable by a computer. Richard Garriott has described the design as a reply to criticism of his earlier games, where players were free to rob and murder townspeople at no cost.

Scoring ethics makes them tractable and shallow at the same time. Once players learn that generosity pays, the axis stops measuring morality and starts measuring optimisation, which is why so many games funnel people into playing consistently saintly or consistently monstrous rather than inconsistently human. Designers have spent decades trying to escape that trap, mostly by replacing the single axis with faction standing, or by refusing to show the number at all.